


Still Life

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Adaptation, Artist Steve Rogers, Brooklyn, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 20:12:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers and a very modern form of art therapy. </p><p>(The one where Steve draws himself out of despair and into some notoriety when his cartoons hit the internet, but he's still not allowed to look at Tumblr without an okay from Pepper.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Life

For Steve, drawing in the park was initially a means of escape. Escape from the apartment he'd been given that felt nothing like a home. Escape from a world that confused and horrified him. Escape from all of the dark thoughts in his head. Almost every day, he sat on a bench surrounded by hundreds of people and ignored them all, ignored his surroundings entirely beyond the professional soldier's situational awareness that was as automatic as breathing (which was why he knew that he had three SHIELD agents watching him at all times), and drew from memory instead of the vibrant life than surrounded him but could not penetrate beneath his skin. They had defrosted his body, but somehow he was still frozen where it counted.

The Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges were the same, thank goodness, and sometimes he drew them, but mostly he drew the things that weren't the same, the people and places that were gone now and that he missed so badly he ached with it. He worked his way backward through time, from the freshest faces -- his Commandos, Peggy, Howard, Chester Phillips, the SSR support teams, the gals from the USO tours, Doctor Erskine -- all the way back to life here in Brooklyn when it had still been familiar. When it had still been something he was looking forward to seeing again. And always Bucky, alive and laughing and untouched by war and darkness and death. Who'd probably be kicking his ass for moping as long as he was.

Once upon a time, he'd trained to be a working artist with an eye toward ad agency employment and maybe the odd commission. But then had come the war and the only commission he'd ever accepted had been his captaincy in the Army and everything that had followed from that had led to here, the acres of Brooklyn Bridge Park that used to be working docks and the ferry and were now a kind of Tuileries with dog runs and skate parks and ecologically-approved grasses. He explored it all in a methodical manner, using the pedestrian paths for runs, sitting on the aesthetically-pleasing-but-practically-uncomfortable benches while he ate lunch from the vendors, trying not to look like a tourist in this time or place as he guessed the purpose behind structures he did not understand or, usually, activities he couldn't fathom the guiding principles of. He had plenty of time to do it in, SHIELD mostly giving him busywork in between the "acclimatization lessons," which were useful, and the psychotherapy sessions, which were mostly spent in awkward silence because there wasn't anything wrong with him that a doctor needed to fix and he was disinclined to pour out his innermost thoughts to a total stranger who was undoubtedly writing up reports for Director Fury. He would learn to ignore the ice at the heart of him on his own.

But his own private winter couldn't last forever any more than the real one could, so eventually, slowly, and not always with any realization that it was happening, he thawed out enough to become a part of the world that surrounded him and less of a spectator. He accepted that he was more than a professional obligation to the people he interacted with and that they, in turn, were more than his guardians and that, perhaps, he might even have friends among them. And along with all that, he started drawing what he saw, not (just) what he remembered: Avengers and SHIELD personnel, children in the park, the Manhattan skyline as it stood in the present day. From there, it was but a short leap to finding and drawing the oddities of life in New York, for which his new neighborhood seemed to be a magnet. Steve, much to Tony's disappointment, could meet drag queens and punk rockers and "performance artists" without missing a beat, but the hipsters baffled him. Why did anyone need to wear a knit cap in July?

While he mostly stuck to caricatures and portraits, he also drew cartoons, single-panel ones, usually, of what he found most absurd about his neighbors, sometimes ranging over to Park Slope to capture their entirely different flavor of ridiculousness. He didn't do it with any larger purpose in mind, just to entertain himself, although he'd let his friends and associates flip through his doodle pad if they asked. Clint and Pepper were the ones who asked most regularly, the former perfectly willing to grab his pad off the table or out of his bag without seeking permission first and then provide commentary. (Sometimes Clint reminded him of Bucky so strongly it hurt.) If Tony saw him drawing, he would look over his shoulder and make suggestions that were sometimes brilliant but usually unhelpful because Tony had an engineer's mind and an engineer's aesthetic and form was forever servant to function, which occasionally meant he missed the joke entirely. Which was why there was a page in a notebook with a cartoon of Steve's idea of the perfect Park Slope stroller (space for toddler, primary schooler, family dog, bespoke recycled fabric saddlebags for food coop purchases, wine bottle storage next to the sippy-cup holder, surround-sound audio system for NPR, etc.) that Tony had defaced by diagramming -- in ink -- all of the structural flaws and design inefficiencies and pointing out that it would be too wide for most common doorways and would take up too much of the sidewalk and a dozen other comments that proved he'd never actually been to Park Slope and seen the stroller mafia in action.

The attention of his friends and colleagues was a reasonable preparation for the first time a stranger looked through his notebook, or so he thought. It happened on Pier One on a windy spring day when a gust off the water blew the pad open where it had been lying closed on the bench next to him. Steve had prioritized keeping his lunch safe over his doodles covered and, with no hands free and nobody else on the bench, he left it open where it was -- and the pencil on the ground below it -- once it was clear it wasn't going to be blown any further. And then he'd forgotten about it as he ate, attention on a pair of small yachts maneuvering out of the harbor and up into the East River.

"Those are really good."

Steve looked over at the woman speaking. She was far more attractive full-on than she'd been out of the corner of his eye when he'd noticed she'd stopped and put her foot up on the far edge of the bench to re-tie her shoelaces. Which might or might not have been why it took him a moment to realize that she was not talking about the yachts. "Thank you."

"May I?" she asked, gesturing at the pad.

"If you'd like," he answered with a shrug. There wasn't anything incriminating on the pages, no faces that anyone would recognize or even anything that would give him away as _that_ Steve Rogers. Not that he was hiding his shield -- or hiding behind his shield -- but he could admit that he enjoyed the anonymity after the crushing weight of expectations and attention that had been dropped on him upon his official return to active service. He'd never particularly thrilled to the attention back when it had been important for him to be recognized, but now, with the cell phones and internet and social media and the salacious nature of the 'gotcha' culture that seemed far more tawdry and meanspirited than it had back in the days of needing to stay on Walter Winchell's good side... he didn't mind not being _that_ Steve Rogers if he didn't have to be.

She wiped her hands on her shirt before picking up the pad and Steve watched her for a few moments before it became clear that she was going to give the pages more than a cursory glance. Out of politeness, he returned his attention to the water and the remains of his cemita. He could draw her from memory later and rather thought he would, but with colored pencils, a medium that would allow him to reproduce the light brown of her skin and the much richer brown of her eyes and still do justice to the delicacy of her cheekbones and chin.

He looked over when he heard her chuckle or laugh out loud, but she never looked up and so he stopped waiting for her to.

"Are you a professional artist?" she asked and he did look over then.

"No," he replied. "I studied to be, but life got in the way."

She nodded in a way that offered understanding of the generalities without having to know the specifics. "Do you have a website, at least? Because if you aren't putting these on the web, you should be."

He smiled. "Not yet."

There had been a few suggestions for a Captain America official website (and official Twitter and official Facebook), all of which he had firmly rejected, even after SHIELD's PR department had offered to ghost author everything. He knew what most of the big social media websites were, things like Tumblr and Instagram, although he had been obligated to promise Pepper that he would not visit any of them without being given a direct link by a trusted source -- and that Tony did not count as a trusted source.

The beautiful jogger bent down -- he was perhaps a second late in averting his gaze at the improved view -- to retrieve his fallen pencil and scribbled something on the top page before holding both pencil and notebook out for him to take. He did and saw that she'd written an email address on the page.

"Drop me a line when you do," she told him with a smile. And then she ran off before he could reply. He turned to watch her go until she disappeared behind a pair of cyclists.

A week later, Clint stumbled upon the email address while flipping pages and demanded an explanation, then made a big dramatic production about Steve's inability to grasp the opportunity presented to him. A scene that got repeated with even more drama after he found the sketch Steve had made of his mystery fan a few pages later.

Of course everyone else found out about it a few days later because Tony and Pepper invited him and Clint and Natasha over for drinks and dinner because Bruce was in town and Clint wasn't about to let something like this go. (Sometimes Clint was so much like Bucky, Steve wanted to strangle him.) But once the mocking and the laughter had died down, Tony asked him if he did want a website for his art.

"It's not _art_ ," Steve demurred. "It's doodles and caricatures and cartoons that would probably get a few people sore because I'm poking fun."

He wasn't an angel, wasn't anywhere near as nice or as noble as either history or the PR flacks would have people believe. But there was laughing with and laughing at and if he was going to do the latter, he didn't necessarily want to be in a spotlight when he did. 

"Nobody who doesn't deserve it," Bruce scoffed. "You don't use a very sharp stick, more a well-aimed one. Anyone thin-skinned enough to be hurt by it has bigger problems to sort out."

Steve had done exactly one cartoon of Bruce 'hulking out' over something ridiculous and it had been at Bruce's request and had required at least two reassurances that not only was it okay, it was also wanted. "It'll be good for keeping perspective," Bruce had told him. "Maybe one day I'll be able to laugh about it. Until then, I don't have a ban on other people doing so."

"And by the definition of those who matter, it _is_ art," Natasha added as she took another rosemary sable. "Your college work and your notebooks from the Forties have all been treated as collectible art for the last fifty years. More than."

Steve had been sure it had been a joke when he'd been told that the doodles he'd drawn sitting around in SSR headquarters and the projects he'd done for classes at Cooper Union were worth money, that they hung in private collections next to great masters and were even in a few museums. He hadn't been a great master and he hadn't even gotten a chance to develop a true style of his own, but he had been good and between that and being Captain America, it had apparently been enough. He'd possibly never missed Bucky more than in that moment.

"I don't know if I want to have these out there under my own name," he said, since Tony was apparently serious enough about the website to still be waiting for an answer. "It's one thing for me to goof off on my own, it's another for Captain America to be the one with the stick, however dull the pointy end might be."

"I'm pretty sure you'll be an even bigger hero for taking a stand against hipsters," Clint assured, to general laughter.

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog," Tony said once it had died down. "Use a pseudonym like everyone else."

A comment that precipitated a torrent of suggestions for what it could be, all worse than the next, until Marcel announced that dinner was ready.

The website, _A Stranger (in) Town_ \-- a good play on words even without the movie, which nobody but Steve had seen -- came with the contact info of the designer who'd put it together and the gift of a scanner. DUMBO being a bit of a tech center, Miklos worked a couple of blocks away from Steve's apartment and Steve spent a few afternoons there discussing the site's look and functionality and learning how to use the scanner and the software to edit images. It wasn't hard, but it was complicated and Steve readily agreed to let Miklos handle it for the first few weeks -- they'd chosen a weekly release schedule -- until Steve got the hang of it. Miklos would handle the promotion aspects as well, since Steve was pretty sure he could figure out Photoshop before he mastered social media and he still wasn't allowed to look at Tumblr without Pepper's permission.

He sent the link to the beautiful jogger himself, though, through his new email address for the site. 

The first cartoon posted was of a bar that catered to hipsters, featuring several in skinny jeans, thick glasses, porkpie hats, and ugly sweaters and a drinks board that offered rare European beers (Steve had queried Clint for suggestions) at a fraction of the cost of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which in turn was all that was being ordered. The second was of his Park Slope stroller, which he redid to clean it up a little (Tony's ink commentary couldn't be erased) and add a sanctimonious bumper sticker he'd seen on a Toyota on President Street. The third week featured a simple study of the unofficial boardwalk border between Coney Island and Brighton Beach; he called it "Border Patrol" and it featured two benches, black teenagers sitting on the left one playing video games and listening to a stereo and fat Russian men turning lobster pink as they dozed and sunbathed on the right.

By the fourth week, Steve had figured out how to crop pictures in Photoshop and he was fielding his first requests for interviews and republishing rights because a couple of the Brooklyn weeklies had found the website and the social media postings. Steve thought he could handle the interviews himself, especially because he'd already done email interviews as Captain America. He didn't lie to the questioners, at least not by commission, but he was vaguer than he probably needed to be about his day job and background. Nonetheless, it was less than a fortnight after the first one had been posted that he received a summons to Maria Hill's office. 

"From now on, you will run these through your PR team," Hill told him. 

Steve had three people in SHIELD's public relations unit dedicated to handling Captain America's appearances, correspondence, and interviews. Megan, Zejian, and Robert were all perky and efficient and completely ruthless when it came to wrangling the media and maneuvering Steve into what they deemed "more favorable optics." He'd had PR people back in the Forties, or at least a PR person: Charlie, a born hustler if there had ever been such a thing, who he hadn't blinked an eye when he'd had to go from making sure none of the _really_ naughty pictures with Marlene Dietrich got published (the pictures that did run were suggestive enough) to getting the story of Cap and the Howling Commandos into the funnybooks without making Gabe white or pretending Jim was anything but a Nisei. Steve appreciated what the job was and how the people who did it could do to make his life easier -- and what they could do to him if they thought he wasn't playing along. And he also knew he wanted his SHIELD team nowhere near this. 

"With all due respect, ma'am, I will not," he told Hill firmly, not even flinching when she raised her eyebrow in silent challenge. "This has nothing to do with SHIELD or Captain America. This doesn't even have to do with Steve Rogers as such. This is a private enterprise, something I am doing on my own, and I don't think SHIELD's time or money is required."

"Stark's time and money is good enough, but not ours," Hill retorted sourly. "You've taken it easily enough so far."

Tony was paying for the website and its upkeep, which Steve thought was generous and had thanked him for it, but it was also neither here nor there and none of SHIELD's concern. 

"I'm grateful for everything your people have done for me, Commander, and I understand that I might still need SHIELD's guidance and assistance on several fronts," Steve replied, "But I am not its property and I'm not indentured to its service. If my having any level of independence from SHIELD is going to be a problem, you should let me know now so that I can start making alternate arrangements."

He wondered if Hill thought he was bluffing. He wasn't. He'd been docile and obedient so far because he'd been lost and helpless and overwhelmed, but he didn't know if they had confused that with actual biddability. 

Hill chuffed out a laugh and leaned back. "It's good to finally meet you, Steve Rogers."

By the six month mark, _A Stranger (in) Town_ was making a shocking amount of ad revenue (which Tony insisted Steve keep) and Steve had gotten a few inquiries about commissions. He was careful about which ones he considered accepting -- some were galling in their presumption and others were straight-up con jobs and some just required too much work in too short a time considering that Steve was now working more regularly for SHIELD. But some were just right, either clearly in his wheelhouse or something he'd always wanted to do. When he got his copy of the children's book, it was a special feeling to see his name on the title page, even if it wasn't his name. It was a different feeling to see the book on sale in Park Slope, which for a few months had had a semi-official witchhunt trying to identify the mysterious chronicler of their foibles. 

But the artist known as Nomad remained forever a mystery. 


End file.
